oakland tribune

The President is continuing to shine a light on to the Republican budget. He used terms like draconian to describe the Republican budget. I talked about the Republican budget here. President Obama’s speech was extremely pointed, partisan and perfect. He is to be congratulated.

As our population gets larger, the percentage of Americans who are mentally ill, confused, upset, angry and otherwise disaffected becomes larger. Well, the percentage is about the same, but the numbers are larger. I think that’s what we saw in Oakland, California yesterday.

From Oakland Tribune:

The suspect in a shooting rampage at an East Oakland private university told investigators he was angry at a female school administrator and students, saying they teased him and “were not treating him respectfully,” Police Chief Howard Jordan said Tuesday.

The suspect, One Goh, admitted his involvement in the Monday shooting and told investigators that one female administrator in particular at Oikos University was the object of his fury, police said.

Jordan, speaking early Tuesday, would not identify the administrator but did say she is not among the injured. “We don’t believe that any of the victims were the ones that teased him.”

March was a good month for the auto industry. They continue to rebound.

An inventor sues British Petroleum for stealing his inventions, which seem to have helped plug one of the gushing wells.

I know that many people have pointed out Paul Krugman’s article called Pink Slime Economics. I have to take just a couple of minutes and highlight this excellent column. This is a must read –

But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.

And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)